One More Time

In Kurt Vonnegut's Latest (and Last?) Book, It's Deja Vu All Over Again

October 26, 1997|By David L. Ulin. David L. Ulin is the author of "Cape Cod Blues," a chapbook of poems. He is writing a book about Jack Kerouac for the University of California Press.

TIMEQUAKE

By Kurt Vonnegut

Putnam, 219 pages, $23.95

Over the years, I've come to look upon Kurt Vonnegut as something of a friend. It's an odd thing to say of someone with whom I have no relationship, but simply as a result of reading him, I feel I know a bit about the man. What has made such a connection possible is the consistency of Vonnegut's writing, its irresistibly inviting tone. That's not to say he hasn't written some bad books, but more important is the way that, throughout his oeuvre, he has managed to balance a gentle, if unyielding, cynicism with a heartfelt quality of kindness to produce his own "gaily mournful" outlook on the world. This, he explains near the end of his new book, "Timequake," is the responsibility of the writer, because, "Many people need desperately to receive this message: `I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.' "

For anyone who has ever felt a similar connection to Vonnegut, "Timequake" is a difficult work to assess. It comes billed, after all, as his final effort, the last time we will have his delightfully skewed perspective to help us make sense of our lives. Originally planned as a novel, in which "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum"--the so-called timequake--turns the universe back from 2001 to 1991 and forces everyone to relive that decade of their lives, the book was gutted and refitted with a series of autobiographical reflections after Vonnegut decided it "did not work, . . . had no point, (and) had never wanted to be written in the first place." Although it's tempting to ascribe his retirement to these issues, more apropos is the fact that he will be 75 in November and hasn't been particularly active in recent years. As he points out in the prologue of "Timequake": "Johannes Brahms quit composing symphonies when he was fifty-five. Enough! My architect father was sick and tired of architecture when he was fifty-five. Enough! American male novelists have done their best work by then. Enough! Fifty-five is a long time ago for me now."

This is not the first time Vonnegut has expressed such ideas. His last book, the essay collection "Fates Worse Than Death," was filled with reflections about the futility of writing--and even of living--and "Timequake" extends those observations within its partly fictional frame. Here, as there, Vonnegut wonders at humanity's apparently insatiable taste for mass disaster and laments the dumbing down of society, the erasure of history and the disappearance of anything resembling a context for our lives. Late in the book, he recalls that "when I started out as a writer, I could refer to events and personalities in the past, even the distant past, with a reasonable expectation that a fair number of readers would respond with some emotion, whether positive or negative, when I mentioned them." Now, he notes, what people recall are "events that had been made much of by TV . . ., and very recently." To mitigate this failure of memory, Vonnegut invokes a wide array of friends and family, many of whom have died. It's a simple act of preservation, but a powerful one, and it is mirrored by the book's fiction sections, which are constructed around the centering personality of Kilgore Trout.

Trout is perhaps Vonnegut's most quintessential character, an obscure science-fiction writer whose outlandish plots bear no small resemblance to his creator's own. In "Timequake," actually, Vonnegut describes him as an "alter ego," and his recurring role as a kind of cartoon Cassandra--absurd, ironic, but ultimately right on the mark--may provide some insight into how the author sees himself. What makes Trout's appearance surprising is the fact that he has been retired since 1973, when, at the end of "Breakfast of Champions," Vonnegut chose to emancipate him as a gesture of good faith. "I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout," Vonnegut explained in that novel. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career. . . . Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free."